


Christmas Blowout

by SylaBub



Category: Mystery Science Theater 3000
Genre: Christmasy feel-good fun, Multi, set mid-canon, the beginnings of ot3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-20 02:54:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13137594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylaBub/pseuds/SylaBub
Summary: When Kinga gets invited to a Christmas party she can't resist the opportunity to ruin, she needs help from unlikely sources to make sure it's the best, most revenge-filled Christmas ever.





	Christmas Blowout

**Author's Note:**

  * For [smitshappens](https://archiveofourown.org/users/smitshappens/gifts).



> Gift fic for smitshappens!! You offered a lot of prompts as suggestions, so I tried to work as many of them in here as possible! I really hope you like it!
> 
> (I am a screenwriter primarily and am rather new to prose fiction, so I apologize if this is a disaster, but I love these characters so much I was jumping at the chance to do it.)

\---48 hours before the party---

After spending over forty years with her, from the day they were cloned to running their own experiments on Moon 13, Max knew there were countless words he could use to describe Kinga Forrester. Terrifying, powerful, brilliant, unbeatable, an absolute crazy person, and the uncontested love of his life were just a few that made the list regularly.

One word he had never used to describe Kinga Forrester was quiet.

But that word described her on December 22nd as she sat at her desk, staring blankly at something on her computer screen. At first, Max didn’t think much of it- sometimes, Kinga would get transfixed when she saw something unusual, like something beautiful she didn’t immediately know how to destroy. But when she hadn’t moved or spoken in 32 minutes, Max started to worry.

“Uh, Kinga?” He asked, gingerly, hoping not to upset her. Whenever he did, he usually woke up with something slimy in his bed. “You okay?”

“Look at this. I mean, what the hell is this?”

He looked over Kinga’s shoulder to find a brightly colored eVite, complete with 2004 ClipArt, on Kinga’s computer screen. In shades of red and green so neon it almost hurt Max’s eyes, it read:

“Hello [guest]! You are formally invited to Pearl Forrester’s Christmas Party Extravaganza aboard the Widowmaker on December 24th at 6pm! (Transportation not provided, black tie required). BE THERE OR PREPARE TO FREEZE IN THE VAST EMPTINESS OF SPACE!”

“This is… kinda sweet, right?” Max asked. “I mean, in a weird, twisted, your-grandma kind of way. She invited you to her party! Haven’t you been saying for years you want more of a relationship with your family? She’s reaching out to you!”

“This isn’t reaching out,” Kinga scoffed. “This is her doing the bare minimum so I can’t accuse her of not caring about me. Look, she didn’t even put my name on it.”

“So… are you just not gonna go? I mean, freezing in the vast emptiness of space sounds pretty serious, and Pearl isn’t a woman of empty threats.”

Kinga looked up at him, the old glint in her eye returning. “Oh, we’re going,” she replied. “In fact, we’re gonna give my grandma a sweet little Christmas gift.”

“Why do you have that look on your face like we’re not gonna do that?”

Her evil smile deepened. Yup, there it is, Max thought. Absolute crazy person.  
\---24 hours before the party---

“Hello?” Jonah Heston called as he walked into the Moon 13 base for the first time. He’d woken up that morning expecting the Mads to have dredged up some Christmas-related horror for him and the Bots that was somehow worse than the one where Santa had turned out to be a murderous android. Instead, he’d received a note that the experiment was cancelled, and barely had time to read it before getting sucked into a pipe and delivered down to the base.

“Heston! In here!”

He rounded a corner to find Kinga at a lab table, hunched over a spread of chemicals and technology.

“Well? What are you waiting for? Come help me!”

Jonah’s apprehension turned to absolute terror. Kinga had never let him see her looking anything less than utterly perfect, and right now, she looked like a total disaster with sweat dripping down her face and locks of red hair springing out from her always-perfect bun. And she definitely never asked for his help. It had to be a trap.

“Uh, I should probably get back to the—“

Kinga pulled off her safety goggles with a sigh. “Look, were you a robotics major at Gizmonics or not?” she snapped.

Jonah blinked. That wasn’t what he was expecting. “Um, yes, but—“

“Then stop wasting time and come help me! I’m working with some very dangerous materials and I need a lab assistant.”

That didn’t exactly make him feel psyched about whatever her plan was, but there was actual desperation in her green eyes. Something inside Jonah softened, and before he could even really process his decision, he was picking up gloves and lab goggles to help the woman who’d kidnapped him and tortured him with bad movies for the last year. Damn these heroic, good-guy instincts!

“Hold this,” Kinga insisted, thrusting a metal plate full of tubes into his hands. She poured a bright pink chemical into the system of tubes, and it glowed as it reacted with the metal. For a second, it almost looked pretty.

And then the whole plate exploded, showering Jonah with bits of hot pink metal.

“Dammit!” Kinga hissed, adding new chemicals to the remaining solution. “I thought it was ready that time!”

“Look, if you’re trying to kill me, the bad movies are doing a damn good job,” Jonah replied, making a mental note to himself to act like the experiments were making him crazier. Terrible dialogue and cinematography, he could handle, but something about being alone with Kinga was disarming in a way he hadn’t prepared for. “You don’t need to do all this.”

“Relax, will you? Not everything is about you. I just needed someone to hold the pieces in place. The skeletons all cited some kind of labor law and went on vacation en masse, and Max is such a klutz that I’m not letting him near actual science with a ten-foot pole.”

She gave him more tubes and poured the new solution inside. This time, it solidified. Realizing he wasn’t going to be blown up at any second, Jonah began to relax. “So what exactly are you doing, then?”

“I’m going to my grandma’s Christmas party tomorrow night. All year, she’s been working on this project designing perfect robot hostesses to wait on her. I’m gonna walk in and bug the robots so that they attack their precious creator and torture her in the worst way imaginable.”

“You’re gonna make her robots waterboard her?”

“Better,” she shot back, her smile overtaking her face. “They’ll hold her down and force her to watch my kindergarten ballet recitals. On loop.”

Jonah was briefly boggled. He was pretty sure that if his grandma could spend every minute of the rest of her life watching embarrassing videos of him as a little kid, she would. He couldn’t believe someone’s grandma would actually find that torturous, no matter how bad the 5-year-old dancing was.

“How do you… know about the robots?” He asked, trying to change the subject. They were starting to veer a little too close to the personal for comfort.

But the answer he got didn’t help. “Every time I try to get together with her, she brushes me off for those stupid robots.” She drove a scalpel into the table, angry. “I mean, I can deal with it if she doesn’t want to see me. But what really gets me is all her little implications that her experiments are so much better than mine. Jesus, I get it! Driving a man crazy with bad movies isn’t real science in the way that building robots is!” Her grip on the scalpel grew tighter and tighter as she talked, and the hard plastic handle snapped off in her hand. “But I’ll show her. She’ll be sorry.”

Maybe it was his good guy instincts, or maybe the fact that she had a series of terrifying and probably illegal weapons she could train on him at any minute, but Jonah felt himself drawn to comfort her. “You know what?” he said. “You’re totally terrifying. You’re so scary it’s amazing. And if your grandma doesn’t get that, then she deserves anything you’re going to do to her.”

Kinga tilted her neck upward to look Jonah in the eye. A different smile crept over her face than the victorious one he was used to seeing. This one was almost… soft. “You mean that?”

“Totally.”

“Thanks, Heston.”

He smiled back down at her. She held his gaze for a second too long before aggressively clearing her throat and shoving a new contraption of metal into his hand. “Now hold this before I stab you with a scalpel.”

\---16 hours before the party---

Jonah was shaken awake in the middle of the night by an incoming communication from Moon 13. Before even putting on his glasses, he could tell Kinga was in bad shape. Her skin was pale and chalky, and her once-white lab coat had been turned technicolor with spilled chemicals. Max sat beside her, worried and confused.

“Heston!” she called. “I need you and Max at this party with me tomorrow.”

“What? Why?” Jonah mumbled, still half-awake.

“I need someone to do final checks on the bugs and be ready to repair in case something goes wrong. And I need Max on my arm to remind her I have a totally capable second banana.”

It didn’t escape Jonah that Max’s face wilted a little on the words “second banana,” but he still laid a worried hand on Kinga’s arm. “Kinga, are you sure you need to do this?” Max asked. “I mean, you’re not sleeping, you’re stressed-“

“I’m fine!” she snapped, trying to steady the shaking in her hands.

“Christmas is all about, you know, friends and happiness. Isn’t a massive revenge plot kind of going against the holiday spirit?”

Kinga rolled her eyes so hard that Jonah briefly worried she’d rupture a vein. “Don’t start talking about holiday spirit when there are people to torture!” 

She stormed out without another word. Max and Jonah sat still, staring at each other on their respective screens, awkwardly.

“So… we’re going, then?” Jonah ventured.  
“I don’t know how much of a choice we have. You don’t want to cross her when she gets like this.”

“What’s the deal with her grandma, exactly? The whole thing seems to be making her a little… on edge.”

Max sighed. “When her dad died, her grandma didn’t want much to do with her. She shipped her off to boarding school and barely ever answered the phone. Kinga’s been trying to win her approval ever since.”

“Wow,” Jonah said. Sure, she was evil, but that was a lot for any kid to deal with.

“So things are tough for her when it comes to her family,” Max said. “I try the best I can to be there for her, but…”

Jonah’s heart went out to Max. “I think it’s sweet,” he said. “How you care about her so much.”

Max shrugged. “She makes it easy. She’s pretty amazing. Crazy, yeah, but… amazing.”

As Jonah tried to sleep that night, he couldn’t get those words out of his head.

\---At the party---

The minute the three of them stepped onto the Widowmaker, Jonah’s eyes went wide with shock. Partying people were crammed into every corner, being waited on by gorgeous golden androids. Even with everything he’d heard about Kinga’s grandmother, he couldn’t help but be impressed by the strength of the technology.

If Kinga was impressed, she didn’t let on. She simply shoved a brown leather bag containing the bugs into Jonah’s hand. “Get started on these,” she hissed.

An android glided over and offered to take Kinga’s coat. She jerked her arm away, removing her purple Moon 13 coat herself to reveal a shimmering silver dress.

Jonah was taken aback. He’d never seen Kinga outside of a lab coat before, and almost never seen her trying not to torture him. But with the soft lighting shimmering on her red hair and the fact that she almost seemed to be smiling, Jonah felt his throat getting oddly tight. She was beautiful.

Max clearly agreed. His eyes nearly bugged out of his head when he saw Kinga, and when she took him by the arm and led him into the party, he might have been about to drop dead. Jonah ignored the unexpected pang of sadness he felt and began checking the bugs.

Kinga and Max found Pearl filling a cup with grain alcohol and Kool-Aid. She looked nothing like Kinga, with her gaudy green eye shadow and tacky Christmas sweater covered in working jingle bells. But with one withering look at Kinga, Kinga felt herself blush. Somehow, Pearl was making her feel like the underdressed one.

“Kinga! Oh, and I see you’ve brought the second banana. Still can’t get a real date, huh?”

Kinga’s jaw tightened. “No, I just figured it would help to have another face at your party, Grandma. I know you don’t have a lot of friends besides your little robots.”

“Well, they certainly are making this an unforgettable night. If you spent any time on real science instead of that silly little reality show, I’m sure you would understand.”

With a forced smile, Kinga whirled around, stormed back through the party, and grabbed Jonah’s arm. He dropped the bug he was holding.

“Jonah, we start the torture now.”

“What? But they’re not ready. I still have to run final checks, and—“

“I said NOW, Heston!”

When Jonah hesitated, Kinga grabbed the bag from his hand. She pulled a bug into her hand, bright pink and humming with energy, and began chasing after the nearest android.

“Kinga, wait. It shouldn’t be buzzing like—“

She grabbed the android from behind as the bug began to vibrate faster.

“Kinga, NO!”

Boom.

\---3 hours after the party---

Kinga woke up on Moon 13 to find Max and Jonah sitting over her. She wiped her eyes blearily. “Guys? What… what happened?”

A flicker of anxiety passed between the guys. Kinga sat up sharply, remembering.

“Did we do it? Is she suffering in eternal torment now, watching me try to do pirouettes on loop at the mercy of her precious creatures.”

“Uh… not exactly,” Max replied.  
“What happened?”

“The bugs, they didn’t exactly… work. There was an explosion, and—“

Kinga lay back down on the mattress, deflated.

“If it’s any comfort,” Jonah offered, “I think you ruined the party pretty thoroughly. I mean, it’s hard to come back from nearly blowing a spaceship in two.”

Kinga didn’t laugh. In fact, she looked dangerously close to crying.

“We can… we can go. I’m sorry it didn’t work out.” Jonah got to his feet, offering a hand out to Max.

“Wait.”

Jonah turned around to see Kinga sitting back up, looking at them shyly.

“I mean, you know. It’s Christmas—I mean, technically, 2 a.m., and you know, Max was… saying all this gooey shit about how Christmas is a time you spend with, like, family, and I just…”

Max began grinning wildly.

“Max, wipe that stupid grin off your face or I’m rescinding my offer.”

“Offer?” Max asked. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

“Well, Die Hard is no fun to watch alone.”

“Die Hard?” Jonah laughed. “Are you actually letting me watch a good movie for once?”

“Don’t push your luck, Heston,” Kinga muttered, sliding to the side of the bed to make room for Max and Jonah. “I know a great movie about Santa battling with his landlord that I’m definitely showing you for the experiment tomorrow.”

“The experiments are still on?”

“Of course. And you better not mention a word of this on the air. I have a reputation to uphold, you know? In fact, I have an excellent plan for the finale…”

But her laugh when she said it told Jonah that even if the bots and Netflix viewers would still see Kinga as a maniacal villain, he wouldn’t be scared of her anymore. After all, how bad could her plan really be?


End file.
